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I'm confused.

So a while ago, I posted a question asking for help on deciding, and narrowing down a topic for my Internal Assessment in History. I got various responses, and one of the main criticisms of my topic was that it was about WW2. It has started to seem as if there is somewhat of a double standard, and that the choice of topic is just important as the paper itself. I always thought that no matter the subject, if you write a good enough paper then you can receive a score of 7. However, people have told me that it is almost impossible to receive a 7 on a paper about a world war, or any "over-used" topics. Can someone clarify this for me?

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You can receive a 7 on any topic you do. The only thing is that with very common topics such as things relating to Hitler, Stalin, WWI, WW2, etc these kinds of things have been done a lot, and therefore your teacher/the IB moderators likely have some knowledge on the topic. With really obscure topics you can sometimes get a high score because your examiner knows nothing about the topic and can't say something like "Hey they didn't include X when they should have, so minus 3 points for Criterion B."

What I find is that if you want to do an IA on one of these really common topics, try to find something a little less known about it. For example, my favorite time period in history is WW2 and I wanted to do my IA on it, but I didn't want to do a really common topic. I ended up doing a much lesser known event that occurred within the time period of WW2, and since I learned a lot, my teacher didn't know anything on my topic, and I really liked the topic since I like this period in history, I got almost full marks (in addition to following the guidelines to a T). You might find this approach a little better. It's just that with some topics they're so overdone it's just boring for the teacher, and learning about lesser known events is important in history too. You can't just know all the major things, the little things matter also.